The 7 Weirdest Things Made By 3D Printing

Below:

Next story in Science

The cost of 3D printing has long kept the technology in a select
few hands, but all that is changing as 3D printing blossoms into
a full-fledged trend.

This June, Staples will start retailing a consumer 3D
printer, the Cube 3D Printer, for $1,299 — not cheap, but not
out of reach of the dedicated techie, either. Proponents hope
that as costs come down, more sophisticated printers will reach
the general public, allowing for digital DIY manufacturing.

Though copyright and quality issues remain a concern, 3D printing
has already made its mark in some pretty weird ways. Read on for
seven strange objects created by 3D printers.

1. A working gun

It looks more like a toy than a deadly weapon, but the world's
first
3D-printed gun has gun control advocates as well as pro-gun
rights enthusiasts concerned and excited. Last year, Cody Wilson,
a radical libertarian/anarchist from the University of Texas' law
school, announced plans for printing a gun, establishing a
nonprofit called Defense Distributed to fabricate the weapon and
distribute the plans.

In early March, Wilson and his team achieved their dream,
successfully testing the "Liberator" on a Texas firing range.
Except for a firing pin made from a metal nail, the gun is made
from plastic pieces printed on an $8,000 Stratasys Dimension SST
3D printer. The gun successfully shot a .380 caliber bullet, but
exploded when its creators tried to modify it to shoot a larger
5.7x28 rifle cartridge.

The world's first 3D-printed violin is half technological wonder,
half papier-mâché project. DIY violin-maker Alex Davies used 3D
printing to make a plastic form for the violin's body, which he
and his team then covered in newspaper and glue. A piece of
cardboard made the neck and some picture-hanging wire served for
strings. The result, announced online Feb. 27 via a somewhat-difficult-to-listen-to
YouTube video, was no Stradivarius, but its creators declared
it "not bad for a weekend and 12 dollars."

3. A dead king's face

After discovering the skeleton of long-lost King Richard III
under a parking lot in Leicester, England, archaeologists turned
over the skull measurements to facial reconstruction expert
Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee. Wilkinson and her
colleagues sculpted computerized flesh to computerized bone and
then
3D printed the resulting bust — a lifelike look at a man dead
more than 500 years.

The device works by creating uniform droplets of living embryonic
stem cells, which are the cells present in early development that
are capable of differentiating into any type of tissue. The
printer is so gentle that it can squirt out as few as five cells
at a time without damaging them. Researchers can use the dabs of
cells to rapidly test drugs or to build miniature scraps of
tissue. The eventual goal is to grow whole organs from scratch.

5. Most of a skull

3D-printed organs may be a dream for the future, but scientists
can already build some body parts. In March, surgeons replaced 75
percent of a man's skull with a plastic one made by 3D printing.

Replacing damaged or diseased bone is not new, but the OsteoFab
implant is the first to be custom manufactured via 3D printing —
an advance that helps bring down the cost. Oxford Performance
Materials, the company that created the implant, plans to work on
other biocompatible implants for the rest of the body.

6. A bionic ear

Did you hear that? Probably, if you're wearing a
3D-printed ear created by Princeton University researchers.
The bionic ear, made from calf cells, a polymer gel and silver
nanoparticles, can pick up radio signals beyond the range of
human hearing.

To make the ear, the researchers printed the gel into an
approximate ear shape and cultured the calf cells on that matrix
to create something appropriately biological. An infusion of
silver nanoparticles creates an "antenna" for picking up those
radio signals, which could then be transferred to the cochlea,
the part of the ear that translates sound into brain signals.
However, the researchers have no plans to stick the ear to a
human head. Yet.

Can't wait to see what your baby will look like? Japanese company
Fasotec has you covered. The engineering firm can take magnetic
resonance images (MRI) of a developing
fetus in the womb and convert them into a 3D-printed
paperweight of your fetus in white plastic, surrounded by a clear
plastic tummy.

Fasotec's main gig is creating 3D prints of scanned organs for
doctors and medical students, so fetus keepsakes are something of
a promotional sideline. Japanese moms can get theirs for about
100,000 yen (approximately $975), not including the cost of the
MRI.